Now
a new voice is joining the chorus -- No Doubt, the multiplatinum band from
Anaheim whose reunion tour is being greeted as one of the hottest tickets of the
summer. Singer Gwen Stefani and her band mates have put into play a plan to
ensure that fans, and not ticket brokers, wind up with the best tickets on each
tour stop.

"It's scalper-proof," says No Doubt's manager, Jim
Guerinot, who started his career in the trenches as an independent concert
promoter and knows the business inside out. (He also manages Stefani's solo
career and other acts, including Nine Inch Nails and the Offspring.)

No
Doubt, whose tour is promoted by Live Nation, has reserved the prime seats for
each of its shows for distribution through the
band’s website. That's about 10%, or around 1,500 tickets, of the total
available at each arena or amphitheater the group will be playing when the tour
gets underway May 3 in East Rutherford, N.J. The tour will conclude on the
band's old Orange County home turf with July 29 and Aug. 1 shows in
Irvine.

Tickets don't go on sale to the general public until March 7, but
fans who have signed up for Tour Club membership, as the
program is called, get first crack at up to four prime seats.

"It really comes down to taking care of the people who have
supported us as a band for 22 years," bassist Tony Kanal said Friday. "As far as
scalping goes, I don't think you'll ever be able to eliminate it. But there are
ways to get those tickets into the hands of our fans, and this Tour Club thing
seems to be a clever and strategic way of doing that.

"These are the best
seats in the house," Kanal said. "They're right next to the stage, so those are
the people we feed off of. If those people are the true fans, that makes the
shows so much more rewarding for us. It's a win-win situation . . . except for
the scalpers."

A membership costs $15, which covers the band's cost of
implementing the plan, and also comes with assorted No Doubt tchotchkes.
(Separately, anyone who buys a ticket at either of the top two price levels,
whether through the Tour Club or not, will receive a free download of the band's
entire catalog.)

Once the tickets are ordered, they can't be picked up
until the night of the show. The tickets are printed with the purchaser's name,
and the buyer has to show a government-issued ID to claim the ticket at a
special gate. Buyers will be admitted immediately into the venue to preclude
anyone from heading out to the parking lot to scalp them.

One facility in
Cincinnati refused to go along with No Doubt's requests, Guerinot said, so the
band dropped Cincinnati from its tour itinerary.

"We really appreciate
that Live Nation is allowing us to hold back these tickets and set up this
mini-operation inside their event," Guerinot said. (Asked for comment for this
story, a Live Nation spokesman said, "We'll let Jim's comments speak for us
all.")

The system already has a bit of a track record.

"We used it
on Gwen's last tour and the Nine Inch Nails [2008] tour with great success,"
Guerinot said. "It's flawless. Well, the flaw would be that you can't do it for
15,000 seats. But the truth is, 15,000 seats aren't being brokered at every
concert. You can control who gets the best ones, and that becomes a
tremendous disincentive to brokers."

Guerinot doesn't take credit for
inventing this approach.

"It's all modeled on what I saw Bruce
Springsteen doing with tickets for the first 10 rows of his shows," he said. "I
remember reading about it and I thought, 'That's clever -- how do we expand on
it?' "

Under this plan, "the people who buy the tickets are the ones who
go in and see the show," Guerinot said. "So even if ticket brokers have signed
up for the fan club, it doesn't serve them, because they don't go there to see
the show."